Latest news with #Chernow
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Book Review: Ron Chernow's 'Mark Twain' gives readers an honest assessment of beloved author's life
Pulitzer Prize winning author Ron Chernow is known for writing massive biographies of the country's most enduring figures, including Ulysses S. Grant and Alexander Hamilton. So it comes as no surprise that his biography of author and humorist Mark Twain clocks in at more than 1,000 pages. It's also forgivable, considering that Twain was such a colossal figure in American literature and history that his authorized biography was more than 1,500 pages long. Chernow's 'Mark Twain' is well worth that length to learn more about the author best known for introducing readers to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Chernow's aptly portrays Twain as someone who 'fairly invented our celebrity culture,' the precursor to the influencers that dominate our lives today. Twain had no qualms about cashing in on his fame, with his name being used to promote cigars, pipes and other products. But Twain was known just as much for the attitude linked to the humorist and his works. Twain, as Chernow describes him, was 'someone willing to tangle with anyone, make enemies and say aloud what other people only dared to think.' Chernow's biography avoids the trap of idolizing Twain and gives and honest assessment of the author's life, including his flaws and contradictions. Revered for addressing the evils of slavery in 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,' Twain was also someone who avoided lending his voice to condemning the practice of lynching. That silence, Chernow writes, was a major missed opportunity to help foster a national debate. Chernow also delves into the uncomfortable subject of Twain's obsession in his later years with teenage girls, developing close friendships with teens that he dubbed his 'angelfish.' Chernow's willingness to give readers the unvarnished truth about Twain makes the biography stand out, as does his ability to simultaneously explore the historical and literary context of Twain's writing. Even Twain's lesser-known works are addressed. Twain comes alive in the pages of Chernow's biography, which shows much he was influenced by his wife and her 'delicate restraining hand." It also portrays the complex and fraught relationship Twain had with his daughters. The book drags at some points, which is inevitable in a tome of this size, and is strongest when it tells the relationship Twain had with the written word. Chernow writes that 'words were his catharsis, his therapy, his preferred form of revenge.' The recurring theme of Chernow's biography is Twain's love affair with the written word, and it ably demonstrates the impact that relationship had on a nation. ___ AP book reviews: Andrew Demillo, The Associated Press
San Francisco Chronicle
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Book Review: Ron Chernow's 'Mark Twain' gives readers an honest assessment of beloved author's life
Pulitzer Prize winning author Ron Chernow is known for writing massive biographies of the country's most enduring figures, including Ulysses S. Grant and Alexander Hamilton. So it comes as no surprise that his biography of author and humorist Mark Twain clocks in at more than 1,000 pages. It's also forgivable, considering that Twain was such a colossal figure in American literature and history that his authorized biography was more than 1,500 pages long. Chernow's 'Mark Twain' is well worth that length to learn more about the author best known for introducing readers to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Chernow's aptly portrays Twain as someone who 'fairly invented our celebrity culture,' the precursor to the influencers that dominate our lives today. Twain had no qualms about cashing in on his fame, with his name being used to promote cigars, pipes and other products. But Twain was known just as much for the attitude linked to the humorist and his works. Twain, as Chernow describes him, was 'someone willing to tangle with anyone, make enemies and say aloud what other people only dared to think.' Chernow's biography avoids the trap of idolizing Twain and gives and honest assessment of the author's life, including his flaws and contradictions. Revered for addressing the evils of slavery in 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,' Twain was also someone who avoided lending his voice to condemning the practice of lynching. That silence, Chernow writes, was a major missed opportunity to help foster a national debate. Chernow also delves into the uncomfortable subject of Twain's obsession in his later years with teenage girls, developing close friendships with teens that he dubbed his 'angelfish.' Chernow's willingness to give readers the unvarnished truth about Twain makes the biography stand out, as does his ability to simultaneously explore the historical and literary context of Twain's writing. Even Twain's lesser-known works are addressed. Twain comes alive in the pages of Chernow's biography, which shows much he was influenced by his wife and her 'delicate restraining hand." It also portrays the complex and fraught relationship Twain had with his daughters. The book drags at some points, which is inevitable in a tome of this size, and is strongest when it tells the relationship Twain had with the written word. Chernow writes that 'words were his catharsis, his therapy, his preferred form of revenge.' The recurring theme of Chernow's biography is Twain's love affair with the written word, and it ably demonstrates the impact that relationship had on a nation.
Winnipeg Free Press
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Book Review: Ron Chernow's ‘Mark Twain' gives readers an honest assessment of beloved author's life
Pulitzer Prize winning author Ron Chernow is known for writing massive biographies of the country's most enduring figures, including Ulysses S. Grant and Alexander Hamilton. So it comes as no surprise that his biography of author and humorist Mark Twain clocks in at more than 1,000 pages. It's also forgivable, considering that Twain was such a colossal figure in American literature and history that his authorized biography was more than 1,500 pages long. Chernow's 'Mark Twain' is well worth that length to learn more about the author best known for introducing readers to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Chernow's aptly portrays Twain as someone who 'fairly invented our celebrity culture,' the precursor to the influencers that dominate our lives today. Twain had no qualms about cashing in on his fame, with his name being used to promote cigars, pipes and other products. But Twain was known just as much for the attitude linked to the humorist and his works. Twain, as Chernow describes him, was 'someone willing to tangle with anyone, make enemies and say aloud what other people only dared to think.' Chernow's biography avoids the trap of idolizing Twain and gives and honest assessment of the author's life, including his flaws and contradictions. Revered for addressing the evils of slavery in 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,' Twain was also someone who avoided lending his voice to condemning the practice of lynching. That silence, Chernow writes, was a major missed opportunity to help foster a national debate. Chernow also delves into the uncomfortable subject of Twain's obsession in his later years with teenage girls, developing close friendships with teens that he dubbed his 'angelfish.' Chernow's willingness to give readers the unvarnished truth about Twain makes the biography stand out, as does his ability to simultaneously explore the historical and literary context of Twain's writing. Even Twain's lesser-known works are addressed. Winnipeg Jets Game Days On Winnipeg Jets game days, hockey writers Mike McIntyre and Ken Wiebe send news, notes and quotes from the morning skate, as well as injury updates and lineup decisions. Arrives a few hours prior to puck drop. Twain comes alive in the pages of Chernow's biography, which shows much he was influenced by his wife and her 'delicate restraining hand.' It also portrays the complex and fraught relationship Twain had with his daughters. The book drags at some points, which is inevitable in a tome of this size, and is strongest when it tells the relationship Twain had with the written word. Chernow writes that 'words were his catharsis, his therapy, his preferred form of revenge.' The recurring theme of Chernow's biography is Twain's love affair with the written word, and it ably demonstrates the impact that relationship had on a nation. ___ AP book reviews:
New Statesman
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Mark Twain and the limits of biography
Photo by Circa Images / Bridgeman Images What makes a person who they are? This is the greatest and simplest mystery of all our lives; it is a ceaseless puzzle, tormenting, and intriguing, one that we'll never solve for ourselves, nor for those closest to us. But for those we'll never meet, there is biography, that form that purports to offer a method by which to puzzle out motive and character, to reveal the soul of the subject. But there are a couple of problems with this method, with this whole idea, which can make even thinking about the genre uncomfortable. First, the issue of evidence. In his life of Mark Twain, Ron Chernow – best known now, perhaps, for the biography of Alexander Hamilton that led to Hamilton the musical – lists the vast amount of material available to anyone interested in the most famous and influential writer in the history of the United States. To trace the adventures of the man born in Missouri as Samuel Clemens in 1835, one may read of course his 30 books and 'several thousand' magazine articles; then, in the archive housed at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley, there are 30,000 letters (from Twain and his family and written to them), 46 notebooks and no fewer than 600 manuscripts left unpublished at his death. 'Perhaps no other American author can boast such a richly documented record,' Chernow notes. If you've ever written a letter or kept a notebook yourself, you'll know how little of our lives makes it into what might be called a record. We are heartbeats and breath, and most of what builds us vanishes forever, whoever we are. And fame casts a long shadow. As Chernow writes, when Jane Clemens was asked what distinguished her brilliant son Sam from other children, she said that 'when he had gone anywhere, if only downtown, when he came home all the children would gather around to hear what he had to tell. He knew even then how to make things interesting. She also said that when she saw a crowd running, she didn't ask what was the matter, but 'What has Sam done now?'.' This is taken, the notes tell us, from 'More Twain Recollections', in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, 4 June 1944. Twain died in 1910. Here is a yarn that shows the boy who would become Twain as we (and his mother, and those readers in 1944) would wish to see him. This is not a criticism of Chernow or his method; it's just unavoidable when you apply any method in attempting to piece together a life. And Twain's was an extraordinary life. Born into a loveless marriage and precarious respectability – and into a family with a history of slaveholding – Clemens's determination to create himself has become, for good or ill, a measure of what it means to be an American. With his life as much as his writing, he 'impressed himself upon the world as a personality as much as an author, a singular, salty, colourful figure who was instantly recognisable, defining a new form of celebrity. He had elevated himself into a character superior to any of his creations.' Chernow shows us a boy addicted to narrative from an early age. As a printer's apprentice, or 'devil', at a local newspaper, he ('supposedly', the author qualifies) caught hold of a scrap of paper on the street, a fragment of a life of Joan of Arc. This 'betrayed his first spark of literary interest', Chernow writes, but his understanding of the power of the voice came from summers spent listening to tales spun by 'Old Uncle Dan'l', an enslaved man kept in bondage at his uncle's home. 'We would huddle close about the old man, & begin to shudder with the first familiar words; & under the spell of his impressive delivery we always fell a prey to that climax at the end when the rigid black shape in the twilight sprang at us with a shout,' Twain wrote in a letter decades later. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn would base the character of Jim in part on Old Uncle Dan'l, and Chernow traces thoughtfully the evolution of Twain in the matter of race. As a youth, during the Civil War, he briefly enlisted in a Confederate militia, but later in life would become a powerful advocate for the rights of black Americans. In the 1880s he put a young black man, Warner T McGuinn, through Yale Law School; McGuinn would go on to mentor a young lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, who would argue Brown vs Board of Education before the Supreme Court in 1954, and who would become the high court's first African-American justice. Is it fair to call Twain an enlightened man? It would seem so, in Chernow's telling. He resisted the prejudices that could have sprung from his upbringing; in the early years of the 20th century, he deplored the imperialist tendencies of President Theodore Roosevelt. Yet Chernow's biography makes it challenging, at times, to consider the question, because it is so focused on Twain that the historical context in which he lived can recede into the background. Can a biography be too closely focused on its subject? But Twain is so much a part of the history of the United States, the 74 years of his life spanning the era in which the country became itself. I am willing to allow, certainly, that this may be a matter of personal taste. Chernow dives minutely into Twain's marriage to his beloved Livy, assesses his struggles as a parent and provides heart-rending detail, for instance, on the suffering of his youngest daughter, Jean, incapacitated by seizures. But when it comes to the wider framework around Twain's life, the deeper context of the political and financial standing and crises of the United States – a country nearly catastrophically divided in his lifetime, the legacy of which we all live with still – one wishes for more. It's eye-popping to read of Twain's almost comic inability to resist any huckster with a gleam in his eye; he married well, and made plenty of money from his writing, but he lost astonishing sums in speculation. A fiendishly complex typesetting machine, a contraption for printing carpets, a patent digestive nostrum: the very same fellow who wrote The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg fell for them all. Yet I would have read less about Jean's affliction and more about other chumps, great and small, who lost fortunes at the time, and what that said about Twain's native land. Twain was the publisher of the memoirs of General (later President) Ulysses S Grant: but most of what we hear about Grant is Twain's opinion of him. (Chernow is also the biographer of Grant. Maybe he'd had enough of him.) Strange to read a biography of Mark Twain – that most vibrantly entertaining of writers and personalities – and feel a little weary of him by page 900 or so. At the end of his life, his (apparently non-sexual) obsession with very young girls springs disturbingly to the fore: he called them his 'angelfish', and once they turned 16, he lost interest and dropped them (there really was a 'school' of angelfish) with stunning abruptness. Chernow doesn't excuse Twain but notes that his subject's apparent thirst for a kind of pure, uncorrupted adoration was bottomless. Despite his love for his wife, he never recovered from his boyhood crushes; and, as Chernow notes, his greatest works are marked by a distinct lack of rounded, adult female characters. And yet those works are not the lesser. They are the wellspring from which the American literary voice – colloquial, powerful, uninhibited, adventurous – sprang, and finally no biography can do that voice justice. Best, finally, to hear it for yourself. Mark Twain Ron Chernow Allen Lane, 1,200pp, £40 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: Joan Didion without her style] Related
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
'Hamilton' author Chernow's new book takes on icon of American letters, Mark Twain
NEW YORK -- Historian Ron Chernow's latest work may surprise readers who know him best for the book which inspired the musical 'Hamilton' and for his biographies of George Washington and Ulysses Grant. The 1,200-page 'Mark Twain' will be published next week. It's Chernow's first release since his Grant biography came out in 2017, and the first time he has taken on a literary writer after a career defined by celebrated books about business leaders (John D. Rockefeller, the Morgan dynasty), presidents (Grant and Washington) and, most of all, Alexander Hamilton. His many honors include the Pulitzer Prize for 'Washington: A Life,' the National Book Award for 'The House of Morgan' and the National Book Critics Circle prize for 'Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.' But a book on Twain had been in his thoughts for decades, dating back to when he saw Hal Holbrook play him on stage in Philadelphia in the mid-1970s. 'And there he was, with the white suit and cigar and mustache and he was tossing out one hilarious line after another,' the 76-year-old Chernow says, remembering such Twain quips as 'There's no distinctly Native American criminal class, except Congress.' Chernow became fascinated by Twain as a prototype of the modern celebrity and found himself drawn less to 'Mark Twain the novelist than the pundit, the personality and the platform artist.' Chernow admittedly is more comfortable with the researchable world of facts than with the more intangible qualities of the imagination. But he found much to identify with Twain, relating to him as a fellow widower (Twain outlived his wife, Olivia, by six years; Chernow's wife, Valerie Stearn, died in 2006), as a public speaker and as an author fortunate enough to write full time. Chernow also looks closely into subjects familiar to him — politics and finance, notably the various failed business ventures that left Twain short of money despite his author royalties and the inherited wealth of his wife. Toward the end of the book, the historian addresses the friendships an elderly Twain cultivated with teen and preteen girls, whom Twain called his 'angelfish.' 'At the time Twain's behavior was regarded as the charming eccentricity of a beloved humorist with a soft spot for children. We look at that same behavior today and find it odd and disturbing. It's important to get both perspectives,' Chernow says. 'Twain's behavior was chaste and none of the angelfish or their parents ever accused him of improper or predatory behavior. At the same time, there was such an obsessive quality about Twain's attention to these teenage girls — he devoted more time to them than to his own daughters.' During a recent interview at his Upper West Side Manhattan apartment, where his glass of Diet Coke stood on a coaster illustrated with a sketch of Twain receiving an honorary college degree, Chernow also reflected on Twain's family, his politics and the sadness in his soul. Chernow's comments have been condensed for clarity and brevity. 'I really don't know what he would say about Donald Trump. I could, yes, but I don't want to guess. But we do know what he said about political figures of his own day. And he hated Teddy Roosevelt. He saw that Teddy Roosevelt had a very large ego, very self-absorbed and a Mr. Bombastic personality. But he (Twain) has a wonderful quote where he says that Teddy Roosevelt is the Tom Sawyer of the political world of the early 20th century. He said that he was always hunting for attention. And then he has this great line. He said that in his (Roosevelt's) frenzied imagination, the great republic is one vast Barnum's circus, and he is the clown, and the whole world is his audience.' To actually read about the children of famous personalities is almost invariably sad, as it often is with Mark Twain. The one who suffered from this most acutely, I think was the middle daughter, Clara, who was kind of insanely competitive with her father and felt overshadowed by him, wanted to kind of trade on his reputation, but then didn't want him to get the attention. She said that she would be in a room with her father, and she felt she was only Mark Twain's daughter, that she was reduced to the level of a footstool. And she also had a very interesting line, one that has a very contemporary ring: He would come into the room and he would flood the room with talk.' 'There's that time when he goes to the Sandwich Islands and he meets the American diplomat Anson Burlingame, who advises him to 'cultivate your betters,' which Twain really takes to heart. I think that with Twain, if someone asks me, you know, did he marry Olivia for her money? I would say definitely not. It was a true love match. And as Twain said late in life, there was not a single day of his marriage that she didn't say, 'I worship you,' 'I idolize you.' This was just kind of pouring out of her and her letters. On the other hand, the more you know about Mark Twain, the more you know that he could never have married a poor woman. 'And the irony of Twain's life is that he spends his entire life attacking the plutocrats on the one hand, and on the other, he's doing everything in his power to become one. This man embodies in his person every tendency of the time.' 'There's a tremendous amount of self-loathing in him. I have a quote later in the book — he says that (poet Lord) Byron detested life because he detested himself. Twain said, 'I'm the same way.' You know, that's a really harsh, harsh thing to say. But I think that he saw all these impulses within himself that he was really powerless to stop. And then he realized he hurt other people. I think that Mark Twain did fit the stereotype of the funny man who's sad and depressed under the surface and is kind of releasing that through the humor.'
